kkylin

56 ms·

1. 541.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   Very much agree. The experience of reading it was interesting for me: on first reading I did not like it much, but the more I thought about the story and about how to interpret it, the more sense it made, and the more depth it gained in my
2. 542.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   I like that saying; may use that at some point...
3. 543.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   I agree with what you said, but high variance research means high variance outcomes... not just scientific but also professional, and not just oneself but also one's grad students and so on. It is a chance we should all take from time
4. 544.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   I've found Sierra to be very disappointing. A few new features I'll never use, and things I do use everyday are now broken, e.g., the new PDFKit broke Skim annotations. Sigh. The new machine actually looks ok to me, though I
5. 545.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   Yes, that's true -- math is not a physical science in that sense. Though as another poster pointed out, theoretical physics is not so different from mathematics in this way, so perhaps the distinction is more between experimenters and
6. 546.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   Yes and no. In some fields, such as mathematics (applied & pure), one can squeak by without a grant, and many do. This has to do with the funding model in different fields -- math departments tend to have enough TA positions to suppor
7. 547.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   I loved the original Foundation series as a teen. Re-read them just a few years ago, when I'm much older. The ideas were every bit was stimulating, but the writing really was not that great. And plot holes and inconsistencies. But
8. 548.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   Ditto. Despite the title of the article, this was more about the particulars of her life than any of her specific ideas. I was a little disappointed.
9. 549.▲
   by kkylin 10y ago

   Should anyone find themselves near Purchase, NY, PepsiCo headquarters ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_M._Kendall_Sculpture_Ga... ) is worth a stop.
10. 550.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Thank you. I had known about Taylor's work from a course on scaling methods in continuum mechanics (it is also one of the introductory examples in Barenblatt's very nice book Scaling ), but did not know that it has other applica
11. 551.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    I should add that one of the things I really like about Julia is having closures and higher-order functions, and also lambda. Unlike other Schemers switching to Julia, I don't miss not having tail recursion (if I was writing the kind
12. 552.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    As others have mentioned, numerical packages like Matlab use 1-based indexing. Most of us who have a numerics background are used to switching back and forth, so I'm fairly oblivious to it.
13. 553.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    I've used Julia for prototyping Monte Carlo and data assimilation algorithms, and also solving simple (1d) nonlinear PDEs (Fourier-spectral code with exponential RK timestepping -- not very complicated as these things go). It's a
14. 554.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    I really like the collection of problems, but I'm not sure it is easy to teach this kind of problem solving. I, for one, would love to try someday. (I'm a mathematician teaching at a large research university in the US, and most
15. 555.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Absolutely agree with this comment. If you get beyond the title, what Gowers is talking about specifically is "If everyone were compelled to take 2 more years of mathematics, what should it be?" It is very different from what
16. 556.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    I actually always thought the same, and finally checked one time. Of course Onsager did many great things, it's hard to say what he should have gotten a Nobel for.
17. 557.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Nitpick: Onsager died in 1976 [1]. Also, his Nobel citation credits his work on reciprocity relations [2] and, I suppose, by extension regression hypothesis and what we would now call fluctuation-dissipation theorem. His solution of the 2
18. 558.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Second that. "Portrait" was a bit of a chore for me the first time around, but a real joy on second reading. I also really liked Dubliners, for the most part. Never had the motivation (or time now) to try Ulysses or Finnegans W
19. 559.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Thanks, I did not know about mu4e. Will have to check it out. Back in the day (before there was google, much less gmail) I loved MH-E. It's been a while since I've done email in Emacs.
20. 560.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Swiss alum here. I've visited semi-regularly, and can never seem to actually find the place in Stata. Tech Square, while not pretty, was functional. Also share fond memories of Bldg 20.
21. 561.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    I really liked this book in my teens. I am not sure I would enjoy it now, a couple decades later. The ageism is part of it. His examples of mathematicians doing their best work when they were young are a little silly: who knows what grea
22. 562.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    The abstract already lost me: "Thus the Schroedinger field is a space-filling physical field whose value at any spatial point is the probability amplitude for an interaction to occur at that point." But the wave function lives on
23. 563.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Yes, I was being sloppy. Thanks for the clarification.
24. 564.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    I'm not a logician, but I think the question (a good one) is not quite well-posed. As I understand, in mathematical logic, a statement being provable means one can deduce it from a set of axioms. If you have a set of axioms A suf
25. 565.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Nice article. Two incidental notes: (1) Siobhan Roberts is an engaging speaker, if you get the chance to hear her speak, it's worthwhile. (2) This reminds me of http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/Car
26. 566.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    This is an excellent question. I think it can actually matter a lot, at least in some cases. (Disclosure: I am on the faculty of a research university, and of course I don't want to think I'm wasting my time or my students'
27. 567.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    I wish that were true here in the US: the train is a reasonable option only in certain regions, e.g., the northeast corridor.
28. 568.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Thanks! Anyone out there know if there is a way to read this in traditional (as opposed to simplified) Chinese?
29. 569.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Ditto! I also find I tend to prefer the way macports is organized.
30. 570.▲
    by kkylin 10y ago

    Yup! Always good to remember that the hydrogen atom is "only" about 10 orders of magnitude smaller than us meter-scale objects, and what's going on with atoms took a long time to figure out.